In digital advertising systems currently, addressable linear advertising is typically carried out as follows:
1. The audience for advertising content is segmented to put each device/subscriber into a demographic or geographic (or other segmented) category. These audience segments for purposes of targeted advertising are also referred to herein as audience profile categories.
2. Segment identifiers (audience profile categories) are pushed down to the customer premise equipment (e.g., set top boxes) so that each device is identified as belonging to viewer(s) of a particular audience profile category.
3. The same segments are used in ad campaign creation. Once a digital ad campaign is ready to launch (but ahead of the launch window,) a scheduler identifies the associated ad content references to expose to each of the audience segments in the flight window (the time interval allocated to advertising content).
4. Before the flight window opens, the scheduler sends down the details of the profiles that are applicable for the next configurable time period (e.g. the next week or the next month) along with the ad content references.
5. The profile/ad references are added to a delivery schedule. This delivery schedule is delivered to each set top box and is used to tell them when a particular ad asset will be transmitted via an invisible/secret channel.
ii. The set top box compares the delivery schedule with the profiles that it has been given and then gets ready to only record the ad assets (onto DVR storage typically) based on the air time and matching profiles stated in the delivery schedule.
iii. The delivery schedule is then used by an asset distributor back in the pay TV operator's infrastructure to broadcast the ad asset via the invisible/private channel at the allocated time.
This approach doesn't consume excessive bandwidth to send ad assets as a broadcast signal, and does not require a spare tuner in the set top box to record the asset. However, the complexity of this prior approach is excessive. A challenge is to simplify the process without sacrificing the flexibility and scalability of the prior approach.